Many homes and businesses access a communications network, such as the Internet, over a digital subscriber line (“DSL”) instead of a traditional dial-up connection. Like a dial-up connection, DSL connects a user equipment to the Internet over existing telephone lines. However, DSL may allow data transfer rate of up to 6.1 megabytes per second, which is faster than a traditional dial-up connection. The communications equipment of the users that are designed to benefit from the DSL technology are generally referred to as a customer premise equipment (“CPE”). To access a communications network, a CPE is generally required to establish a permanent virtual circuit (“PVC”) with a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (“DSLAM”) located at a central office. The DSLAM functions as a bridge between a communications network and the CPE.
To enable a CPE to establish a PVC with the DSLAM, the CPE is generally pre-programmed with a certain set of PVC identifiers and their associated media access control (“MAC”) addresses. Once the CPE is coupled to a telephone line at the customer premise but prior to starting the DSL service, an operator at the central office is generally required to manually configure the DSLAM ports to match the pre-programmed configurations of the CPE so that the DSLAM may properly route data to the CPE.